Yesterday, the director of the failed bureaucracy at the Centers for Disease for Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, announced that the agency would be moving on from areas where it has demonstrated epic incompetence, those would be ‘disease control and prevention,’ and into social sciences where nothing they claim to be true is subject to the basic scientific test of falsifiability.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said that the agency is taking steps to address the impact of racism on public health.

"What we know is this: racism is a serious public health threat that directly affects the well-being of millions of Americans." https://t.co/53pzDHWLJq

— NPR (@NPR) April 9, 2021

If you think Walensky is talking about eradicating racism in the treatment and prevention of disease, you would be wrong.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the death of over 500,000 Americans. Tens of millions have been infected. And across this country people are suffering. Importantly, these painful experiences and the impact of COVID-19 are felt, most severely, in communities of color—communities that have experienced disproportionate case counts and deaths, and where the social impact of the pandemic has been most extreme.

Yet, the disparities seen over the past year were not a result of COVID-19. Instead, the pandemic illuminated inequities that have existed for generations and revealed for all of America a known, but often unaddressed, epidemic impacting public health: racism.

What we know is this: racism is a serious public health threat that directly affects the well-being of millions of Americans. As a result, it affects the health of our entire nation. Racism is not just the discrimination against one group based on the color of their skin or their race or ethnicity, but the structural barriers that impact racial and ethnic groups differently to influence where a person lives, where they work, where their children play, and where they worship and gather in community. These social determinants of health have life-long negative effects on the mental and physical health of individuals in communities of color.

Over generations, these structural inequities have resulted in stark racial and ethnic health disparities that are severe, far-reaching and unacceptable.

This is not trivial. It represents a deadly serious threat to liberty.

In 2015, Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a regulation with the Orwellian title Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. Under that rule, any community that received federal funds would have to use HUD-provided data to analyze housing patterns for racism and then come up with a plan for fixing the racism as a condition of retaining federal money. This is how one of the big-brained thinkers at Vox.com explained it:

The new rules are a big deal for a couple of reasons. First, as the intense pushback against them indicates, they represent a significant change to housing policy that requires cities to actively work to eliminate segregation.

As Rob Breymaier, the executive director of the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, told the New York Times, “This rule makes it clear that the fair housing obligation isn’t just being able to say, ‘I didn’t discriminate,’ it’s also saying, ‘I’m doing something proactively to promote an integrated or inclusive community.'”

And of course, the whole point is that these actions by municipalities will eventually decrease housing segregation, which will ameliorate the kind of inequality that goes hand in hand with it. “It’s also fundamentally about people having opportunity in their lives,” HUD Secretary Julian Castro said. ” And where you live, in many ways, dictates the level of opportunity that you have.”

In July, the legitimately elected Trump administration revoked this attempt to let federal bureaucrats do to housing what “diversity and inclusion” commissars have done to American business, but Joe Biden has directed HUD to revisit the rescinded rule with the intent of reissuing it.

How are these linked? Just read Walensky’s statement and compare it to the justification for the Obama housing rule. Then think back over the past year and how the phrases “public health crisis” and “public health emergency” have been used as talismans to reduce the First Amendment to a soggy heap of wet ashes.

I’ve posted on the direction the CDC is moving several times, most recently in CDC Gears up to Use Research on ‘Gun Violence’ the Same Way They Have Used Research on the China Virus, and CDC’s Incoherence Accelerates as They See Power Slipping From Their Grip. My prediction is that you are seeing the first steps in officially weaponizing the CDC by yoking it with other federal agencies to bootstrap whatever social ill our betters are trying to perfect into a “public health emergency” that will allow bureaucrats to use the court-sanctioned power of public health weenies to issue imperial diktats rather than deal with the cumbersome process of getting elected representatives to agree on legislation. If racism is, indeed, a problem that can be both identified and solved by public health apparatchiks, given their performance over the past year in shutting down churches and providing the intellectual underpinning that allowed police to descend upon funerals and disperse them, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how this plays out.

If true, this trend, unless strongly checked by Congress and the courts, marks the end of our republic as it has existed for these past 230-odd years.